An organization or individual user may wish to archive large amounts of data for extremely long periods, such as decades or possibly indefinitely. In some cases the format of the archived data will be independently decipherable, such as a blob of English text, or there may be confidence that the data will be able to be interpreted in the future by a well-known algorithm, such as a JPEG image file, an MPEG move file, an archive file format, e.g. TAR or ZIP, and the like. However, in many cases the format of the archived data may be closely coupled with the application software that produced it and that is required to interpret it. Additionally, the application software may be closely coupled to a particular computer architecture. Therefore, the data archived in long-term storage may become useless if the application software needed to understand the data becomes unable to run because the particular computer architecture is no longer available.
For example, an aircraft manufacturer may wish to store all of the engineering design and testing data that went into the design of an aircraft in long-term storage for the potential 50+ year working life of the aircraft. This data may be produced by a variety of application software programs, including CAD programs, mathematical analysis programs, simulation programs, and the like. In the event of an accident of the aircraft many years later, the aircraft manufacturer may wish to retrieve that data from long-term storage and make use of it for an accident investigation, related litigation, and the like. If a key element of that data is only useful with a corresponding finite element analysis software program, and the software program or the computer architecture on which it depends is no longer available, then access to the key element of data may not be possible.
Along with storing the data in the archival system, the organization or user may also attempt to maintain the software and hardware platforms required to access the data for the 50+ year period of the useful life of the data. However, maintaining physical hardware for such a long period may be impractical. Hardware components and spare parts would have to be stockpiled for that period, and there would be no guarantees that the hardware could remain functional due to aging of parts, sublimation of lubrication, degradation of FLASH or EPROM memory, and the like. In addition, the organization or user may be required to perform periodic testing to ensure that the software and hardware platforms remain available, further increasing the cost of maintaining the hardware and software for such a long period.
It is with respect to these and other considerations that the disclosure made herein is presented.